Here's how Destiny: The Taken King's new Court of Oryx mode works

Destiny: The Taken King will include a new series of public events for Destiny in the game's new playable area, the Dreadnaught, called Court of Oryx. During a Twitch livestream today, Bungie detailed how the Court of Oryx works and how players will cooperate to take down a series of bosses in an effort to earn new loot.

Unlike other public events in Destiny, which typically spawn randomly in the game world, Court of Oryx's events are player-initiated; they'll need to present a consumable item called a rune, which will drop in the Dreadnaught, to one of the statues just outside the gameplay area in order to spawn challenges in the Court of Oryx.

Game designer Ben Wommack said that the use of statues for Court of Oryx was somewhat inspired by PlayStation 2 game Shadow of the Colossus.

Players initiate Court of Oryx challenges by offering up a rune, which Wommack likened to putting a quarter on an arcade cabinet. The player who presents that rune will apparently score some of the better loot after completing a Court of Oryx public event, but Bungie will prevent players from hogging that metaphorical arcade machine with a debuff, Summoner's Exhaustion, in an effort to let other players initiate the challenge.

There are three tiers of difficulty in the Court of Oryx, each of which corresponds to a tier of rune. Tier one runes represent the easiest difficulty, while tier three runes represent the hardest difficulty. Wommack said that when players finish The Taken King's campaign, they'll be "just about ready" for tier one-level challenges. He added that tier two runes are "just below Nightfall [weekly strike] difficulty."

Court of Oryx events feature bosses that have specific gameplay mechanics that "mix up" how players fight them, Bungie said. Likening the Court's boss challenges to a puzzle, Wommack said "each is a different idea you have to wrap your head around." In today's livestream, Bungie provided a few examples of those challenges. In one, players had to lure a pair of bosses into close proximity to each other in order to cancel out their shields. In another, a boss Ogre's shields could only be canceled out if it was caught in the blast of an exploding Thrall.

Tier two events will combine tier one events, meaning players may have to contend with two, three or four bosses, as well as normal Hive and Taken enemies, at once. Bungie did not show an example of tier three events in Court of Oryx, saying players would have to wait until Sept. 15, the launch date for Destiny: The Taken King, to see them in action.